A FRENCH COUNTRY CHRISTMAS

THOUGHTS ON WASHING-UP, AND ETERNITY

This is the last chapter of my book Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas, also entitled Cooking for Claudine. It was first published in 2008 and is, I’m pleased to say, still in print. If I was asked to sum up what I feel about France and Christmas today, there isn’t much I’d change.

'Tis the gift to be simple,
'Tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down
Where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.”

Old Shaker hymn.

To the victor, they say, go the spoils….and to the person who cooks a big meal, the washing up.

Of course everyone’s tries to help. But a small kitchen can only take so many people, and by the time you’ve explained that those plates don’t go in the dishwasher and that dish should be put in the fridge, it’s easier to do it oneself.

From the salon, thunderous snores indicated that a few of the male guests were sleeeping it off, while the occasional creak and soft footfall from above suggested that one of the younger cousins and her boyfriend were enjoying what the French call a sieste crapuleuse.

Almost everyone else had gone next door, the adults to gossip, the kids to watch TV. Which left to me clean up.

Well, I didn’t mind. It was a chance to unwind, to relive the high points of the meal.

The table cloth, for instance. We’d bought it at a brocante somewhere in the Dordogne, under a baking midsummer sun, sweat trickling down my spine as I bargained over this three-metre length of heavy linen, hand-embroidered at its four corners with the intricate initials of some local aristo. A few stains gave me room to negotiate. We settled on ten Euros, and I lugged away, for the cost of a sandwich and a beer, a length of linen redolent of turtle soup, grouse, beef, burgundy and cognac; a relic of the days of great dinners which, just for today, had been restored, for a single meal, to its rightful place.

I washed out the dish in which I’d served the gratin Dauphinoise, a deep, oval platter with a surface so irregular that it was clearly moulded by hand. Bakings by the hundred had glazed the exterior a glossy black, while the interior had modulated over more than a century into the greeny yellow of old bronze. A short crack in one edge merely added to its allure, though it had counted sufficiently with the woman selling it to say, “Oh, it’s broken – so, say, a Euro?” I would have thought it a bargain at fifty.

With the dishwasher full, I walked to the glass doors of the big dining room, and looked out at the garden that fell away to the hedge marking the end of the family property.

Once, it had been an orchard, of which a few ancient cherry and apple trees survived. During World War II, under the German occupation, it became a kitchen garden, planted with beans, cabbage and potatoes. Forty years later, Marie-Do and I held our wedding reception here, and a few years later, we’d watched our daughter and her cousins scamper on Easter morning, searching for the chocolate eggs which, according to local tradition, were scattered by the bells of France’s churches returning from Rome after the long silence of Lent.

None of it was mine, of course. The concept of “community property” isn’t accepted in France. My mother-in-law had inherited this land from her parents, as her children would inherit it in time, then their children, continuing a line unbroken for half a millenium. One didn’t possess land or houses here, any more than one possessed a river. They owned you, and sooner or later, whether you liked it or not, they would coax you into the stream as they had coaxed me, involving you in its eddies and cataracts, carrying you on to the open sea.

How many other travelers like myself had been welcomed into such families over the years? We came to the door at midnight, to be offered food, drink, money, and, if we were fortunate, the love of someone within that family, and the security and comfort of its table and hearth.

Not to be cast out; no longer to be a poor man and a stranger - what gift could be greater than that?